The charges would have been based on reports from officers at the scene on the night of Oct. 20, 2014, who said McDonald raised the knife over his shoulder in “an aggressive manner,” forcing the officer to shoot the 17-year-old in self-defense. Those reports were refuted by the infamous dashcam video and three of the officers who filed them are set to go on trial next month for conspiracy, obstruction of justice and official misconduct.

That trial and Van Dyke’s convictionearlier this month for second-degree murder and aggravated battery with a firearm are exceedingly rare. Much more often, it’s the person on the other end of police force that ends up arrested, charged and convicted.

A Chicago Reporter investigation has found a troubling pattern of Chicago police officers charging people they’ve assaulted with aggravated battery to a police officer, aggravated assault of a police officer, or resisting arrest. Defense attorneys call these “cover charges” and say it’s a way to cover up bad behavior or justify their excessive use of force.

Two out of every three times a CPD officer reported using force since 2004, they arrested the subject on one of these charges.

Being arrested on these charges can have a profound impact on a person’s life, including spending days or even weeks in jail, losing a job, borrowing money to pay for legal fees, and ending up with a violent offense on your record.

Cover charges are alleged in nearly one in five of the 1,112 police misconduct lawsuits paid out by the city between 2011 and 2017, making it among the most common typesof misconduct leading to a settlement.

Search the updated “Settling for Misconduct” database, which now contains all police misconduct settlements paid by the city of Chicago from 2011 to 2017.

This type of misconduct has cost Chicago taxpayers more than $33 million in legal settlements since 2011, according to the Reporter’s database of police misconduct payouts. That figure does not include millions of dollars more in legal defense fees and the interest that accrues when the city borrows money to cover settlement payments.

Cover charges are filed in police shootings, as in the case of Alfontish “Nunu” Cockerham, a 23-year-old who was shot five times by CPD officer Anthony Babicz in South Shore in June 2015. As he lay in a hospital bed with bullets lodged in his buttocks and right thigh, a judge found probable cause for aggravated assault to a police officer with a weapon charges, based on Babicz’s account that Cockerham pointed a gun at him. He died in the hospital the next day. Video footage later showed Cockerham running away from the officer, raising doubts about the officer’s account.

But more often they are filed in routine interactions between police and the public, the kind that occur on a daily basis in black and brown neighborhoods in Chicago. For example, an 18-year-old girl stopped by two officers for holding a 40-ounce bottle of King Cobra malt beer on a sidewalk in Englewood. When she didn’t give them her ID, the officers tackled her to the ground and forced her into their squad car, then arrested her for aggravated assault to a police officer and resisting arrest, along with underage drinking. The charges were later dropped.

The ‘holy trinity’ of cover charges

Police in Chicago also routinely arrest people for the singular charge of resisting arrest—a phenomenon experts say is concerning, and could mean the problem is far more expansive than the settlement data indicate.

Chicago Police made more than 1,300 arrests between 2012 and September 2016 where the only charge was resisting arrest, according to a Reporter analysis of Cook County court data. More than half of these cases were ultimately dismissed.

“What was the person resisting if there’s no underlying charge?” said Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska and a national expert in police accountability. “That’s just a gigantic red flag that the officer probably used force and is using this resisting arrest charge to provide cover or an explanation.”

Other times cover charges arise from low-level offenses—traffic stops, marijuana possession—that escalate when an officer feels disrespected, said Christy Lopez, a former U.S. Department of Justice official who helped lead the department’s investigation into CPD and wrote a paper about this kind of police misconduct.

“What the police are doing is essentially being bullies,” Lopez said. “I’m going to use force against you because you made me mad.”

This phenomenon is a decades-old pattern. In 1972, U.S. Rep. Ralph H. Metcalfe, who chaired a Blue Ribbon Panel on Chicago police abuse, noted that three charges—disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and battery to a police officer—were so commonly used as cover for misconduct that lawyers referred to them as the “holy trinity.”

Forty-five years later, the U.S. Department of Justice found that the problem persists.

“We heard from numerous advocates and individual victims of police abuse that officers who engaged in force against a civilian routinely file baseless police assault and battery charges against the victim and other witnesses to the misconduct,” DOJ officials wrote in their scathing 2017 report on CPD’s pattern of using excessive force. “Filing false charges not only constitutes an independent civil rights violation, but is a powerful discouragement to potential complainants and witnesses regarding police misconduct.”

CPD is not the only department where this happens. News organizations have identified the use of cover charges in cities from Seattle to San Jose to Washington, D.C. And the Justice Department noted the problem in civil rights investigations in Los Angeles, Detroit and New Orleans.

In many of the cities where the DOJ has negotiated consent decrees, it has required police to begin tracking these arrests and conducting more thorough supervisory reviews to weed out bogus arrests, though it remains to be seen if tracking these arrests is enough to discourage them.

But in Chicago, nothing has been done to stem this practice or even to track it. The consent decree negotiated by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and Mayor Rahm Emanuel and released last month makes no mention of these cases.

The police department referred questions about cover charges to the mayor’s office.

Walter Katz, the mayor’s deputy chief of staff for public safety, said the city is focused on reforms that will reduce the use of excessive force, rather than looking at what he called the “back end” issue of the charges that are filed after force is used. He pointed to reforms the city has already made, including body-worn cameras, new use of force guidelines, and a force review unit, as well as the additional force reporting that will be required by the consent decree.

“From our perspective, those sets of reforms actually address that issue at the front end, to make sure the force that is used is appropriate,” he said.

“Just too aggressive”

Jeffrey Smith had spent the rainy day in early October 2015 like he did many days: hanging out at his grandparents’ house in North Lawndale, where he grew up.

Smith, then 26 years old, was about to accompany his younger sister to the corner store around 9 p.m., when two plainclothes Chicago Police officers appeared outside the gate to the front yard and ordered him to put his hands up.

Photo by Max Herman

Jeffrey Smith stands at the gate outside his grandparents’ house, where he was falsely arrested for aggravated battery to a police officer. Once able to laugh with the police officers he worked alongside as a security guard at Chicago’s Navy Pier, now he says he gets shaky anytime he sees a cop.

Smith was scared. But he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, so he asked the officers for an explanation. The officers just kept repeating their commands, he said. They would later say they saw Smith’s hands near his waistband and they thought he might have drugs. In fact, he was putting on his belt.

It escalated quickly. One of the officers pushed Smith, tripping him. The officers wrote in their reports that Smith was yelling and swinging his arms. They said he pushed them and elbowed one of them, but Smith denies it. The officers called for backup.

“How they approached me was just too aggressive,” Smith said. “I didn’t know what they were trying to do.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Smith saw a female officer approaching. The next thing he knew his body was frozen, two Taser probes sending a pulse of electric current through him. The officers tackled his incapacitated body and handcuffed him.

Smith was taken to the police station and then to the hospital to have the Taser barbs removed. It wasn’t until the next morning, when he appeared in bond court, that he found out he was being charged with resisting arrest and aggravated battery to a police officer, a felony that carries three-to-seven years in prison.

Of the three most common types of cover charges, aggravated battery to a police officer is the most serious. It is a class-two felony, akin to burglary, arson, or kidnapping.

Chicago Police filed 2,883 aggravated battery to a police officer cases between 2011 and September 2018, a rate of more than one per day. The Reporter found that black men, like Smith, are disproportionately likely to be charged.

After he was arrested, Smith spent 10 days in Cook County Jail and lost his job as a security guard at Navy Pier. He picked up odd construction jobs during the 14 months his case was pending to try to care for his 6-month-old son.

“I needed to take care of him, and I could barely take care of myself,” Smith recalled. “You go from being able to take care of yourself comfortably, to not even knowing where your next dollar is gonna come from. Or when you’re gonna be able to work again. Or even if you’re gonna be locked up.”

After more than a year, a jury acquitted Smith of all the charges against him. He settled a lawsuit for excessive force and false arrest with the city in August. The city agreed to pay him $75,000, adding yet again to the tab for taxpayers for this type of police misconduct.

State’s attorney’s office accused of protecting cops

File photo by Sebastián Hidalgo

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx defeated incumbent Anita Alvarez in a 2016 primary election that became a referendum on how the office had failed to prosecute police officers for misconduct.

It’s not always so easy to spot the questionable charges from among the legitimate ones. Cases like Smith’s, where the person is acquitted, make up just under 3 percent of aggravated battery to a police officer cases, or about 60 cases since 2011, according to a Chicago Reporter analysis of Cook County State’s Attorney’s data. Another 100 cases were dismissed. More than 80 percent of aggravated battery to a police officer cases end in a plea deal, by far the most common outcome for cases in criminal court, though not always an indication of guilt.

“Often people will plead or take a deal because they want the court case to be over, because they can’t go about their life anymore with these charges hanging over their head,” said Joey Mogul, a veteran civil rights attorney with the Chicago-based People’s Law Office.

In almost half of the cases defendants pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and in more than one-third of cases they pleaded guilty to a lesser charge.

Civilian Office of Police Accountability

A photo taken by investigators from Chicago’s police oversight agency shows drops of blood on the sidewalk where an off-duty Chicago police officer punched and kicked 19-year-old Nathaniel Taylor in 2015.

Among them was Nathaniel Taylor, a 19-year-old with severe cognitive delays who was walking home from school with his younger brother in September 2015 when they walked through the yard of an off-duty police officer. He later said he was trying to find a place to urinate. The officer, Matthew Jackson, punched and kicked Taylor, and stuck his gun in Taylor’s mouth, according to a lawsuit and a complaint filed with the city’s police oversight agency. The officer claimed part of Taylor’s body had struck his torso, though he couldn’t say what part. The blows sent Taylor to the hospital and required stitches. But it was Taylor who ended up charged with aggravated battery to a police officer, while Jackson went unpunished.

The aggravated battery charges against Taylor were eventually dismissed, and he pleaded guilty to trespassing, a misdemeanor. But not before he spent a week in Cook County Jail and six months on electronic monitoring, fighting the case.

Richard Dvorak, who represented Taylor’s family in the lawsuit, and other civil rights attorneys said prosecutors are partly to blame for pursuing charges even when they know the evidence is flimsy. If a person pleads guilty to aggravated battery or resisting arrest, it is much harder to win a civil rights lawsuit or file a successful excessive force complaint.

“The state’s attorney’s office is being used as an arm of the police department to protect the cops,” he said.

Aside from narcotics cases, most felony arrests are reviewed by an assistant state’s attorney before being formally presented in court, a process called felony review. So far this year, State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office has approved close to 95 percent of aggravated battery to a police officer cases brought by CPD, according to a Reporter analysis of felony review data. By comparison, Foxx’s office has approved just under 80 percent of other felony cases.

Even under reformer Kim Foxx, who became Cook County State’s Attorney in December 2016, the office has approved almost all of the aggravated battery to a police officer cases brought by Chicago Police. Source: Reporter analysis of Cook County State’s Attorney data

The top criminal prosecutor in Foxx’s office strongly denied claims that her prosecutors pursue charges to protect police officers from civil liability.

“When we’re looking at these types of cases, we’re reviewing them based upon the evidence that we have,” said Risa Lanier, who heads the State’s Attorney’s criminal division. “It has nothing to do with any sort of contrived relationship between the State’s Attorney’s office and the Chicago Police Department. We approach every single case, no matter who the victim is, the same.”

Cover charges could be red flag for aggressive officers

Theric Patrick was among the tiny minority whose arrests for aggravated battery were denied felony review by the state’s attorney’s office.

Patrick was sitting on his cousin’s porch on a warm morning in May 2016 playing a video game on his iPad when two officers approached from the street. One of them, Brandon Ternand, demanded to know Patrick’s name. When the 22-year-old didn’t answer quickly enough—and talked back, asking why the officers were bothering them—Ternand slapped the iPad out of his hand, according to a lawsuit filed last year.

Ternand then pulled Patrick off the porch by his dreadlocks and tackled him, while other officers helped him twist Patrick’s arm behind his back to handcuff him and pushed his head into the ground. Then the officer arrested Patrick for aggravated battery, claiming in a report that Patrick punched him in the left side of his head.

A detective assigned to review the case discovered a bystander video that disputed Ternand’s account. Patrick spent the night in lockup. The next morning, the state’s attorney’s office denied the felony charge and Patrick was released. Records show Ternand has not been disciplined for the incident. (The detective, meanwhile, was moved to a midnight shift and is now suing the department for retaliating against her in violation of the Illinois Whistleblower Act.)

Ternand, who joined CPD in 2007, has used force more than 99.9 percent of his fellow officers, according to data compiled by the Invisible Institute. In less than nine years on the job, he amassed 47 documented uses of force. The average Chicago police officer documented less than one use of force every two years. Earlier this month, Ternand was cleared by the Chicago Police Board for fatally shooting 15-year-old Dakota Bright in 2012, one of three times he shot his service revolver in a two-year period.

The Reporter reviewed data from more than 2,200 aggravated battery and aggravated assault to a police officer arrests made by CPD between January 2015 and July 2018, and found officers who made the most arrests on these charges also use force far more often than average.

There are more than 12,000 sworn officers on the force, and most of them made no arrests for these charges in that three-and-a-half year period. But the Reporter was able to identify 23 officers who made five or more arrests for aggravated battery or aggravated assault to a police officer. Nearly all of them were in the top two percent of Chicago police officers for using force. On average, these officers used force more than 7.5 times as often as a typical officer.

“This is not something unique to Chicago,” said Katz, the mayor’s public safety deputy who used to be the independent police auditor in San Jose, Calif. “Those two indicators do follow each other relatively closely.”

Of course, policing is a perilous job that can bring officers into contact on a daily basis with people who are agitated or angry, at best, and dangerous, at worst. The fatal shooting of Commander Paul Bauer in downtown Chicago last February is a tragic, but rare, example of what can happen when officers confront armed suspects.

But in more than 90 percent of battery and assault of a police officer cases, the suspect was unarmed.

Brian Burg and Bryan Zydek, former partners in the Englewood District who came up in the same recruit class in 2007, are among the 23 officers with the most arrests for potential cover charges. Their arrests are emblematic of how officers escalate relatively minor situations, use force to make an arrest, then file charges that seem to justify their conduct.

Together, they arrested five people for aggravated assault to a police officer and resisting arrest between June and December 2015. Zydek arrested another person for aggravated assault that December, two more people for aggravated battery to a police officer the following March, and yet another person for aggravated assault in March 2017, bringing his total number of arrests for these charges to nine in three-and-a-half years.

Three of these arrests started when the officers stopped someone for drinking on the public way, a simple municipal code violation. When the person didn’t immediately comply with the officers’ commands, Burg and Zydek moved to arrest them, escalating the situation.

In two cases, the arrestees had to be taken to the hospital for injuries suffered during the arrest. In four of the cases, all of the assault and battery to a police officer charges were ultimately dropped. In the others the defendants pleaded guilty, mostly to less serious charges.

Lopez, the former DOJ official, said if CPD reviewed these types of arrests, it could help the department flag officers who are using too much force too often. She said supervisors should be closely reviewing the types of arrests that are typically used as cover charges and take immediate corrective action against officers if they bring charges that aren’t backed by evidence.

“I think this is actually one of the easier problems in policing to change, because it’s readily identifiable and you can easily send the message to officers that it’s not acceptable,” she said. “It will flourish where it’s tolerated, but where it’s not tolerated, you can put an end to it.”

But she also knows her prescription may not sit well with officers.

“Officers have to understand that some people are going to be obnoxious and are going to be big jerks to you, and part of being a police officer is taking that,” she said. “That’s something that a lot of officers have trouble with.”

]]>https://www.chicagoreporter.com/chicago-police-use-cover-charges-to-justify-excessive-force/feed/0Police misconduct payouts continue to break the bank in Chicagohttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/police-misconduct-payouts-continue-to-break-the-bank-in-chicago/
https://www.chicagoreporter.com/police-misconduct-payouts-continue-to-break-the-bank-in-chicago/#commentsThu, 08 Jun 2017 20:50:56 +0000http://chicagoreporter.com/?p=1256686Chicago’s costly record of police misconduct settlements showed no signs of tapering off in 2016, with the city continuing to pay an average of more than one every other day.

The total paid for misconduct lawsuits last year alone would have been enough to more than double the funding for the mayor’s highly touted after-school, summer youth jobs, and youth mentorship programs this year. The city paid nearly $32 million in 2016 for 187 misconduct lawsuits and spent $20 million more on outside lawyers to litigate the cases, slightly more than in the previous year and well above what the city budgeted for these settlements, according to new data analyzed by the Chicago Reporter.

The 2016 cases, as well as those paid in 2011, have been added to the Reporter’s Settling for Misconduct database, which now contains information on more than 940 misconduct lawsuits. The database is an effort to bring transparency to the financial burden of police misconduct in Chicago.

Overall, Chicago spent more than $280 million on misconduct lawsuits from 2011 to 2016, plus another $91 million for outside lawyers to help defend police officers in those suits. The city routinely fails to budget enough money for settlements, forcing the City Council to borrow to pay them and adding significantly to taxpayers’ burden.

“We can’t keep spending $30 million and up a year and hundreds of millions of dollars over several years for lawsuits related to the police department,” said Lori Lightfoot, president of the Chicago Police Board and chair of the mayor’s task force on police accountability. “That’s an untenable state of affairs.”

In its final report last April, the task force criticized the city’s police oversight bodies for failing to analyze these lawsuits for trends or patterns, calling it “a significant missed opportunity to ensure accountability.”

The Reporter analysis shows that more than 90 percent of the 2016 cases ended in a settlement, which means the city and police officer do not admit guilt or liability.

But the cases follow many of the same patterns as those that were paid in previous years. Most stem from everyday encounters between police and residents of African-American and Latino neighborhoods: About two-thirds of the cases occurred in majority-black census tracts. Three-quarters of the cases alleged excessive force, false arrest, or both. Nearly one-fourth claimed that two or more officers conspired to violate a person’s rights.

Police shootings, not surprisingly, are among the most costly cases. The city paid more than $12 million last year for 14 police shootings, seven of them fatal. In an additional 31 cases, officers allegedly drew their guns and pointed them at people, including, in some cases, children.

Continued failure to identify trends

Since the Reporter first published police lawsuit data last June, the city has come under increased scrutiny for the high price tag on misconduct and its failure to analyze these cases for trends.

First, the city’s inspector general, Joseph Ferguson, urged Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office to create a chief risk officer position that would be responsible for analyzing claims against the city, including misconduct lawsuits. But the mayor’s chief of staff, budget director, and comptroller replied in a letter that the city wouldn’t look at police misconduct cases until after the U.S. Department of Justice completed its investigation of the police department. The delay, according to former justice department officials and other experts who are familiar with DOJ investigations, was unnecessary.

When the DOJ completed its investigation in January, the DOJ’s report reiterated the IG’s recommendation that the city should “review settlements and judgments on a broader scale to spot for trends, identify officers most frequently sued, and determine ways to reduce both the cost of the cases and the underlying officer misconduct.” The DOJ also cited the Reporter’s database and chastised the city for its lack of transparency about police misconduct lawsuits.

Despite these reports, the city has taken no steps to report on or analyze misconduct lawsuits. Ferguson said he was not surprised at the city’s inaction.

“When our office issued the advisory last year that highlighted the need for a city-wide risk analysis, the city did not commit to undertaking the process necessary to complete that analysis,” he said. “So, no I am not shocked that they haven’t done so at this point. I am disappointed, but not shocked.”

Ferguson said this type of analysis will be one of the regular duties of the new deputy inspector general for public safety, who was approved by the City Council in April. He said he hopes that office, led by Laura Kunard, will be fully staffed by the end of the year.

Lightfoot became animated when asked why she thinks the city hasn’t done anything to address the issue despite concerns raised by her task force, the inspector general, and the Department of Justice.

“It’s of great concern to me and it should be of great concern to every single citizen and taxpayer in the city,” she said. “This is not an acceptable way to manage risk.”

Chicago taxpayers will continue to pay extra for police misconduct lawsuits because the mayor’s proposed 2017 budget doesn’t cover the expected costs – meaning costly borrowing will make up the difference.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s budget continues a long history in Chicago of questionable fiscal management of misconduct lawsuits. From 2012 to 2015, the city spent more than $263 million on settlements, judgments and outside legal counsel for police misconduct. But only $70 million was budgeted for those costs, and the city issued bonds to cover them. At the high interest rate Chicago paid, that borrowing will cost taxpayers more than double over the life of the 30-year bonds.

The city is virtually certain to need more money to pay misconduct lawsuits in 2017 than the nearly $20 million Emanuel has budgeted. The mayor allocated $20 million last year as well, but Chicago had paid out almost 50 percent more than that by the end of August, according to data from the city’s Law Department. By that point, the Police Department had shelled out $29.6 million for lawsuits and judgments, with $23 million paying for misconduct lawsuits, a Chicago Reporter analysis found. (The rest, $6.6 million, paid for police lawsuits and judgments involving car accidents, employment discrimination and the Freedom of Information Act.)

The $29.6 million doesn’t include the cost of outside lawyers to litigate the misconduct cases, which last year cost the city more than $13 million.

Emanuel did propose a $4 million increase to the city’s overall budget for lawsuit settlements and judgments. That money can be used to cover the gap in the Police Department budget. But if past trends are any indication, it will almost certainly not be enough.

Lawsuit costs fluctuate from year to year, but the city’s budget hasn’t covered those costs for at least a decade, according to the city’s most recent financial analysis. To make up an average shortfall of more than $70 million per year, Chicago has relied on issuing long-term bonds to raise cash. Municipal finance experts discourage the practice.

Emanuel’s other fiscal challenges — chief among them the city’s pension fund deficits — have overshadowed the problem of costly police misconduct. But in an April 2015 speech on fiscal reform, the mayor criticized the borrowing practice, blamed it on his predecessor, Richard Daley, and pledged to phase it out.

Nonetheless, Emanuel asked the City Council in May to approve $600 million in bonds; of that, $100 million in 2016 and 2017 would be spent on lawsuits for police and other departments. The council obliged. Those bonds are expected to be issued by early next year, a spokeswoman for the Finance Department said.

The interest rate on those bonds won’t become public until then. But in the past, the city has paid interest rates as high as 6.3 percent. That rate more than doubles taxpayers’ costs for lawsuits, including those for police misconduct, over the 30-year lifetime of the bond. (A recent bump in the city’s credit rating could bring down the interest rate somewhat.)

Molly Poppe, spokeswoman for the Finance Department, said Emanuel’s administration is still determined to wean the city from borrowing to cover lawsuit settlements.

“The Administration has added money to the settlement and judgments budget each of the last four budgets, as well as identifying additional revenue at the end of each year to pay settlements and judgments, decreasing the amount of borrowing for the settlements and judgments,” Poppe wrote in an email.

Chicago has started to address the policing practices that lead to costly police misconduct lawsuits. The mayor’s police oversight reform ordinance created a new deputy inspector general for public safety, whose responsibilities will include analyzing lawsuits for patterns of misconduct. That was an about-face for Emanuel’s administration, which had previously claimed it couldn’t analyze police lawsuits until the U.S. Department of Justice completes its review of the Chicago Police Department. That review could take many more months.

The mayor’s 2017 budget also includes $2.9 million for additional police training, including new mandatory de-escalation instruction, plus $5 million for the next phase of the department’s body-camera program. Body cameras for all officers will ultimately cost more than $6.5 million per year.

The police department is also considering a new, stricter use-of-force policy. Research suggests that could reduce the number of officer-involved shootings.

Some of these steps may reduce the number of lawsuits against police and eventually save the city money. But even so, Emanuel’s new budget will likely saddle Chicagoans with the high cost of misconduct for decades to come.

On a recent Sunday morning, Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson gathered press and top brass to announce that every patrol officer in the city would be equipped with a body camera by the end of 2018. The price tag, Johnson said, would be $8 million.

But police officials now acknowledge, after repeated inquiries from The Chicago Reporter, that $8 million doesn’t even cover the first full year. The long-term cost will actually be much higher: By the time every officer on the force is outfitted, the Chicago Police Department will spend more than $6.5 million each year on the body camera program, according to a CPD analysis provided to the Reporter.

Those millions will be spent on a product for which there is still little research supporting its effectiveness in curbing police misconduct, despite increased interest in body camera programs across the country. A 2014 study funded by the Justice Department looked at the available research on body cameras and found that most of the claims made by supporters—that body cameras reduce use-of-force incidents, civilian complaints and civil lawsuits—are unsubstantiated.

“Police departments should be cautious and deliberate in their exploration of the technology given the lack of research,” wrote Michael D. White, the author of the study and a professor of criminology at Arizona State University.

Instead, Chicago, which has the second-largest police department in the country, acted with speed and urgency.

Within days after the release of the Laquan McDonald video last November—before he fired his police superintendent or established a task force on police accountability—Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an expansion of a body camera pilot program, which had started almost a year earlier with 30 officers in the Shakespeare District on the Northwest Side.

It was the first policy announcement by the Emanuel administration after the video of Officer Jason Van Dyke fatally shooting 17-year-old McDonald sparked mass protests, calls for police reform and demands for the mayor’s resignation.

Less than two months later, Emanuel signed a five-year contract worth up to $10 million with Taser International, the stun-gun giant that is now the nation’s largest body camera manufacturer, to provide the cameras for more than 2,000 officers in seven police districts.

In government procurement, two months is lightning speed.

To quickly make good on the mayor’s promise, the Emanuel administration used an obscure procurement method called “piggybacking,” which allowed it to skip the standard competitive bidding process and overlook two other companies, including Chicago-based Motorola Solutions. Piggybacking allows a jurisdiction to rely on another jurisdiction’s contract for the same product or service. Taser International has been criticized by experts and competitors for encouraging no-bid contracts in police departments around the country.

The contract locks Chicago into using Taser International’s cloud storage software, Evidence.com, for at least five years. By then, CPD could be storing hundreds of thousands of hours of video, making it difficult to switch if the company were to raise the price or the department were to find cost savings in storing the videos on local servers.

“What this means is you will forever be required to pay them for their service, from now till the end of time,” wrote Lee Richards, a sergeant with 10 years overseeing video evidence for the Kansas City, Missouri police department, in a June post on LinkedIn. The post didn’t mention Taser International by name, but referred to the “big mega-vendor.”

Under the contract, Chicago will pay Taser International $78 per officer per month for a body camera bundled with Taser’s trademark stun-gun, plus unlimited storage on Evidence.com. At that price, not including the increase of 500 patrol officers that Emanuel has promised, the total cost over the first five years could exceed $30 million.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Procurement Services, which oversees city contracts, said Chicago got a better price on the body cameras and storage than any other department that has signed with Taser International. (The Reporter couldn’t confirm this claim.) She also said the DOJ, which gave CPD $1 million for the body cameras, approved the contract.

Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd Ward, who attended a presentation on body cameras by Taser International last month, said he wasn’t familiar with the details of the contract, which did not require City Council approval. He said time will tell if the investment in body cameras will be worth it.

“We’re trying something new here,” Hopkins said. “It’s hard to say at the outset if this is money well spent or not.”

Lots of money, little research

When he announced the expansion of the body camera pilot program, the mayor touted it as a tool that would help “enhance transparency and credibility as well as strengthen the fabric of trust that is vital between police and the community.”

Some of those same words were used in the grant issued by the Justice Department last year that sent nearly $20 million to more than 70 law enforcement agencies across the country, including $1 million to CPD, to implement or expand body camera programs. The DOJ has since doubled down on that effort with $20 million more in body camera grants.

But there is little evidence so far that body cameras actually achieve any of those lofty goals.

An early and oft-cited study in Rialto, California found that body cameras reduced citizen complaints by 88 percent and use-of-force incidents by 60 percent. But the tiny Rialto Police Department, with 54 officers policing a population of about 100,000, is hardly comparable to Chicago, with more than 12,000 officers and about 2.7 million people.

A more recent study by the RAND Corporation and researchers at the University of Cambridge of more than 2,000 officers across eight departments in the U.S. (including Rialto) and the United Kingdom also found that body cameras seemed to cause a significant drop in complaints. But they also found the effect of body cameras on use-of-force incidents depended on whether officers decided when to turn on their cameras.

When officers followed the protocol, which requires them to record every stage of every interaction with the community, those wearing cameras used force 37 percent less often than those without cameras. But during shifts when officers used their discretion, use-of-force actually rose 71 percent.

Experts say when police officers fail to turn on their body cameras, it can undermine trust.

That was true in Chicago in July when an officer shot and killed 18-year-old Paul O’Neal, who was unarmed, after he crashed his car into a police vehicle and ran off. The officer was wearing a body camera but didn’t turn it on until after the shooting. CPD’s body camera policy requires officers to turn the cameras on for all foot and vehicle pursuits, as well as most other police-civilian interactions.

In a typical government procurement, particularly for a highly technical product like body cameras or video storage systems, a city issues a request for proposals (RFP) detailing the goods and services it needs and any desired specifications. It then compares the proposals on quality and cost and selects the best deal.

Instead, with piggybacking, also called a “reference contract,” the city uses a contract from another government entity that has already issued a bid for the same products or services

In Chicago, reference contracts are the exception. Of more than 6,500 contracts Chicago has awarded since 2006, just 16 were reference contracts, according to a Reporter analysis of the city’s public contracts database. (This only includes contracts where the procurement type is listed in the database; more than 8,000 contracts awarded since 2006 have no procurement type listed.)

According to city policy, the superintendent has to justify the use of a reference contract in a memo to the chief procurement officer. But the procurement department would not provide that memo or other documents related to the contract to the Reporter, saying they were exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

It is important that government contracts, especially high-profile ones like those for police body cameras, be transparent, said Mike Purdy, a government procurement expert in Seattle who worked for two decades in various contracting roles.

“Everybody should know: How did they go about this? How was the price determined? Did everybody have a fair shake at it?” he said.

Chicago turned to an odd choice for a piggyback: the State of New Jersey, which signed a contract with Taser International for Tasers in 2011. In December 2013, New Jersey added body cameras and Evidence.com subscriptions to that contract. But there is no record that New Jersey conducted a competitive bid specifically for body cameras, and a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of the Treasury declined to answer questions about the matter.

According to Chicago’s reference contract policy, contracts should go through a public procurement process. Cathy Kwiatowski, a spokeswoman for the procurement department, said the New Jersey contract “was competitively bid, and as such, the marketplace was tested to provide the best pricing and value.”

But Purdy said New Jersey’s contract with Taser International “troubled” him and might not have been appropriate for Chicago. A reference contract can be appropriate, he said, when it is recent, covers the same products and is for a similar quantity of goods and services.

New Jersey’s contract seems to fit none of those qualifications, he said. The contract was three years old when Chicago piggybacked on it, and it was for an indeterminate quantity of goods and services from Taser International.

According to Kwiatowski, Chicago negotiated a lower price with Taser International than New Jersey. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have gotten an even better price—or a better product—by competitively bidding the contract to multiple companies, Purdy pointed out.

“How do I know as a Chicago taxpayer that Chicago has negotiated the lowest possible price?” Purdy said. “The way you do that is through a competitive bidding process.”

Taser’s tactics under question nationwide

Taser International was one of the earliest companies to enter the body camera market, in 2009. As demand for body cameras soared after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014—a shooting in which there was no video—Taser International came to dominate the market, in part by encouraging cities to use non-competitive contracting processes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

As of April 2016, Taser had been awarded contracts in 23 of the 26 largest local police departments that had chosen a body camera vendor, according to the Journal. Ten of those were done without bidding.

In Los Angeles, the city council delayed a vote on a five-year, $31 million contract for Taser body cameras last December after concerns were raised that the city had piggybacked off of a much smaller contract from Kern County, California. (The council ultimately approved the deal in June.)

Steve Tuttle, a Taser spokesman, denied that the company encourages piggybacking or no-bid contracts.

“This is what they want,” he said. “The cities ask for the sole source. And sometimes they ask for RFPs. We do what the cities want.”

Taser has also come under fire for hiring retired police chiefs to lobby their old employers. In Chicago, former police Superintendent Terry Hillard was a registered lobbyist for Taser from 2006 to 2015. He lobbied the Police Department on behalf of Taser’s body cameras throughout 2015, according to city lobbyist disclosure forms. The forms don’t specify the nature of the lobbying and Hillard could not be reached for comment.

CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said that Hillard “did not meet or consult” with the team of top brass that decided on the body camera rollout and “had no involvement in the process whatsoever.”

He said Taser International was chosen because no other company could bundle body cameras and Tasers.

Yet if the goal was to bundle body cameras with other products already in use by the department, other options existed. Coban Technologies, the company that makes the dashboard cameras for police vehicles, and Motorola Solutions, which makes the department’s two-way radios, both manufacture body cameras that sync with their other devices.

Guglielmi said the department “looked at” other vendors, but wouldn’t give names or say how they were tested or evaluated. He said the pilot program was aimed at determining whether CPD wanted to continue with body cameras at all, not at finding the best hardware or the best video storage solution.

The department appears to have made up its mind about using body cameras. But others aren’t so sure.

Ald. Hopkins said he hopes body cameras will ultimately decrease the number of lawsuits against the Police Department, for which Chicago has paid out more than $210 million in the past four years alone.

“If judgments and settlements and excessive force cases against CPD go down and we can attribute part of that to body cams, then I think it’ll be justified,” he said. “If not, we’ll have to revisit it.”

]]>https://www.chicagoreporter.com/in-swift-push-for-body-cameras-chicago-cut-contracting-corners/feed/2Police liability insurance measure goes to court in Minneapolishttps://www.chicagoreporter.com/police-liability-insurance-measure-goes-to-court-in-minneapolis/
https://www.chicagoreporter.com/police-liability-insurance-measure-goes-to-court-in-minneapolis/#commentsMon, 15 Aug 2016 11:25:09 +0000http://chicagoreporter.com/?p=347650UpdateAug. 22, 2016: A Minnesota judge ruled Monday against placing on the November ballot an amendment that would have required Minneapolis police officers to carry their own liability insurance to make payouts in misconduct settlements. Hennepin County Judge Susan Robiner dismissed the lawsuit brought by supporters to get the amendment on the ballot, ruling that it preempted and conflicted with state law. In an earlier 10-3 vote, the Minneapolis City Council had rejected the plan.

The City Council recently rejected the initiative, which has gained momentum since the high-profile police shootings of Philando Castile and Jamar Clark in the Twin Cities region. The city claims the proposed charter amendment clashes with state law; supporters of the measure are asking a state court judge to force the city to place the item on the ballot.

The amendment would require police officers to carry professional liability insurance — similar to the malpractice coverage carried by doctors and lawyers. Currently, taxpayers pick up the tab for settlements in civilian lawsuits against police officers.

The pursuit of the idea is uncharted territory for any U.S. city – and for police accountability activists. The charter amendment demonstrates a new willingness to experiment with alternative methods of reform at a time when repeated police shootings of black men are highlighting the volatile relationship between law enforcement and communities of color. The liberal Twin Cities joined a seemingly unending national discussion following the police shootings of Clark and Castile.

Last month, in suburban Falcon Heights, police officer Jeronimo Yanez shot and killed 32-year-old Castile during a traffic stop. His girlfriend recorded and reported live on Facebook the horrific aftermath. And in May, the Hennepin County attorney declined to charge two officers in the fatal shooting of 24-year-old Clark, who was killed in his North Minneapolis neighborhood in November. The incident led the next day to an 18-day encampment outside the officers’ station house and boosted interest in the police insurance petition, which was just then gathering signatures.

What is most striking about this idea, one local expert says, is not whether it makes it onto the ballot but how it indicates a lack of trust in the status quo on the part of many Minneapolis residents.

“Before, other police accountability measures like civilian review boards rested authority on police departments to enact change,” says Michelle Phelps, a criminologist at the University of Minnesota. “They pre-supposed trust in the police department in order to enact those reforms. But this measure embodies the idea that the police department cannot be trusted to police their own.”

As a lead proponent of the amendment, Michelle Gross told The Chicago Reporter in June , “It’s using market forces to motivate individual cops to change police culture.” That is different, she noted, from relying on city hall or the police department.

The police insurance amendment transfers some liability from the city onto an individual officer and his insurance provider, making an officer financially culpable if he or she has too many complaints. (The initiative does not spell out how many complaints.) While significant questions remain, not least around implementation, they were not what the City Council was considering in its decision.

“What was before us was whether voters should be allowed to weigh in on issues. It was not about approving the insurance,” said Council Member Alondra Cano, who called the motion to approve the amendment’s placement on the ballot. “My job was not to play judge, it was to ensure that a process was followed and completed and, it was.”

Though the petition surpassed the threshold for verified signatures with more than 6,869, city officials said the amendment did not have legal standing to be placed on the ballot. In her brief to the council, City Attorney Susan Segal determined that the amendment both preempted and conflicted with existing state indemnification and employment law.

“I couldn’t clearly identify anything in the amendment that was in violation of the law,” he said in a phone interview. “I think the amendment language could have been clearer but that’s not what our vote was about.”

Johnson, an engineer by profession, points out that most city council members are not lawyers.

Cano sees a missed opportunity to advance a critical local dialogue around police accountability that Minneapolis residents increasingly want.

“It’s generally understood that cities, especially municipalities, can have the most impact on reforming local police culture and systems—much more than the state and federal government,” she said.

“Ultimately the buck stops here at your local council member or chief of police.”

Supporters of the police insurance amendment have until Aug. 26 to get the initiative on the November ballot. Whether or not a judge allows the proposed amendment to appear on the ballot, local activists say that momentum is building to demand change.

“People are beginning to see that this is a much deeper problem than just a few renegade officers,” said Tony Williams, an organizer with Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, which along with the NAACP and Black Lives Matter led community protests around the shootings of Clark and Castile.

“People are done with the status quo,” he said. ”They want to find creative, alternative solutions.